It is midday in the Jardín Botánico de Quito. In a dense, knotty patch of vegetation, somewhere between the orchid house and the bonsai garden, shaman Taita Shairy is talking about ancestral knowledge. Bathed in the equatorial sunlight, he radiates a piercing dignity that would stir the soul of the most stubborn agnostic. His message is simple and powerful: ‘We are connected to the trees and the mountains and the soil. This is where our ancestral wisdom comes from. We don’t have gods. Our spirits are our ancestors, and nature is where we find our wisdom.’ And despite the noise of the traffic shrieking through the downtown district of La Carolina, ferrying Quito’s 2.8 million bodies back and forth down the corridor of volcanoes, we hang on the shaman’s words, suspended for a moment in time and space.
This story is from the Summer 2020 edition of Wallpaper.
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This story is from the Summer 2020 edition of Wallpaper.
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